At the end of each session, I usually give coaching clients an exercise or, if they’ve created an action point for themselves, I ask if they’d like me to hold them accountable for doing what they said they would do. Most say yes 🙂 One client went beyond a yes and even created a system on how I could hold him accountable exactly – which is what I’ll be sharing with you today.

Since then, I’ve actually adopted this awesome accountability system with other coaching clients and it’s worked beautifully so far. Perhaps it’ll work for you too.

On this episode of the #CoachYourself series, I’d like to share a great tool for beginning any kind of self-inquiry: The Wheel of Life ♥

I first encountered this exercise when I was a coach-in-training with The TLC Solution. On the very first day of our training, we were asked to fill out our own Wheel of Life and immediately, coach each other with that as a jump-off point! Things were happening too fast for me to even doubt if I could coach or not but blessedly, the Wheel of Life did around 60% of the work for me.

Let me explain how it works – then you’ll get why it’s such a great starting point for self-inquiry.

Yesterday, after a private yoga class, a student of mine and I were talking and I ended up saying in Filipino, “There’s a huge difference between the quality of our decisions when we’re centered and calm and the quality of our decisions when we’re scattered and stressed.”

In my head, I laughed to myself because it’s exactly what I needed to hear for myself.

As I’m writing this, it’s been a little over a week since I got home from a two-month teaching gig in Bali. I expected to have a challenging time integrating myself back in Manila life and… let’s just say it’s a little harder than I expected. In the wake of settling back in, having a new long-term goal to reach, and going back to an expensive city technically jobless, I’ve been struggling to ground myself. It’s daily work and every day I’m feeling a little better than I did before so I’m grateful.

Yesterday’s breakthrough, talking about the quality of decisions, made me realize that I had lost my clarity. More than ever, I understand how easily clarity can be lost, and how valuable it actually is. And what did I feel like when I returned to clarity? Relieved. I felt soooo relieved. It felt like a return to my true goals, a return to a sense of purpose, a return to hope 🙂 More?

Energy: Knowing what to do gave me a renewed boost of energy

Letting go: Clarity helped me understand what efforts at grounding and abundance were actually unproductive. It’s a push towards acting with long-term goals in mind, in the present

Creativity!: Clear goals means our boundless creativity has a direct object, something to pour forth into. What we want to create is clear. Figuring out how to do it is play, or it can be if we let it 🙂

Breathing space: Here’s where I felt clarity’s gifts the most. When you’re clear, it’s easy to understand that you don’t have to do everything, you don’t have to be everything, you don’t have to have everything now, you don’t have to do something even if it seems to make sense. In fact “what makes sense,” will change once you’re clear-seeing, goal-seeing 🙂

Now, enough about clarity. How do I get there? Well. With a looooooot of work. Haha!

I’m now starting this series on my blog, #CoachYourself. I hope to share tools by which we can be our own life coach, given enough time and dedication to daily inner work. I find it fitting that our first tool will be about clarity. I’m calling it, The Goal Funnel.